


A Viper's Kiss

by Odaigahara



Series: discord, i'm howling at the moon [1]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Bandits & Outlaws, Fables - Freeform, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, M/M, Morality | Patton Sanders is a Sweetheart, Rescue, Shapeshifting, Strangers to Lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:00:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26023852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odaigahara/pseuds/Odaigahara
Summary: Patton had stayed up all night making sure the Viper didn't die, watching anxiously as his breath stuttered and his pulse slowed, as he held onto life by a skinny little thread. Now his skin was a healthier color, scales flushed a darker yellow-green, and his chest rose and fell in deep, even breaths. The knife wounds hadn't been as bad as Patton had thought.Still, he lingered inside, keeping the Viper in the corner of his eye and tinkering with a few half-finished toys. Patton usually kept his smithing to the shed where he’d built his furnace, but he kept worrying that the Viper would die once he was out of sight.Or he could wake up and kill Patton while he was distracted with his work. That was a possibility, too.*Patton finds a notorious criminal in the snow, wounded and freezing to death. Against all sense he takes him in, and braces for the consequences.They're a little different than he was expecting.
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders & Morality | Patton Sanders, Deceit | Janus Sanders/Morality | Patton Sanders
Series: discord, i'm howling at the moon [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1884838
Comments: 18
Kudos: 121
Collections: TSS Fanworks Collective





	A Viper's Kiss

**Author's Note:**

> TW at the end of the chapter.
> 
> Based on a prompt from the Discord! Title suggested by (I think?) parallelmonsoon.
> 
> Edits for flow and grammar may happen later! I'm being very silly and posting this pretty fast after writing it.

Patton recognized the scarring on the hand before he saw the rest of the body.

Greenish-yellow scales, parched pale by the cold and dappling up the back of the hand: the mark of the Viper, according to every royal messenger from the outskirts to the capitol. He had scales across his face and body from a witch’s curse, and one monstrous yellow eye that got brighter with every person he killed. He was a wanted criminal, a traitor and a murderer whose death would be a mercy to the empire and everyone in it.

He was lying on his back, half-buried by snow, and the ground around him was stained a deep, bloody red. Patton couldn't have left him there if he'd tried.

He bundled himself tighter in his furs and ventured closer, squinting to improve his night vision. “Hello?” he tried, and inched closer. He had an axe to cut firewood, and of course his hammers, but as a tinker he didn’t usually need much in the way of weapons. If the Viper got up right now, he wouldn't have any way out but to run.

The Viper didn’t look much like he could get up at the moment, though, so Patton figured it was safe enough to approach. He crouched beside him, putting his hands under the stranger's arms and pulling him out of the snowdrift. “You haven’t had an icy time of it, huh?” he murmured, brushing a hand over the chilled face. Definitely the Viper. The scales went all up the left side of his cheek, cradling his eye like a crescent moon.

The Viper's eyes were closed, lips stained blue. Patton felt a pang of sorrow, tears springing to his eyes. The cold might have been a soft way to die, lulling him to sleep and leeching the pain away, but before that the Viper had been cut up pretty bad. He must have been scared. He must have been desperate, too, to drag himself so far in the middle of a blizzard.

Patton couldn't leave him there. Notorious traitor or not, the Viper had been somebody's son once, maybe somebody's brother. He couldn't just leave him to rot.

Just in case, Patton ran a finger along the body’s neck, searching for movement. Logan said the best ways to check for life were a mirror to the nose and mouth and checking to see if the heart was still beating. Patton didn’t have a mirror, and the odds of the Viper being alive after freezing in a blizzard were pretty low, but-

Under his fingertip was a tentative flutter. “Oh,” Patton breathed, new urgency flooding through him. “Oh, gosh, you’re alive.” But he wouldn’t be alive for long if he stayed in the cold.

Patton strained and pulled him upright, lantern falling over by his feet. The Viper was dead weight- hopefully not literally- and a little taller than him, which made folding him over his shoulder kind of difficult, but Patton managed well enough. Getting him back to the cabin was harder.

Patton was about to keel over by the time he stepped through the door. He laid the Viper down in front of the fireplace and stoked the flames, wracking his brain for what to do when someone was cold. Warm them up, right? Except not super fast or they might get hurt, he remembered that much the last time Logan had passed through. Was cuddling acceptable?

He bit his lip. Being so close to an infamous murderer seemed like a bad idea. What if the Viper woke up and was mad Patton had seen him weak? What if he just felt like he had to kill someone, since he’d done it so often before? Wouldn't it be easier to leave him to die and bury him respectfully, so the gods might accept his soul despite his crimes?

No. That didn’t matter. The Viper was in Patton's care, deadly cold but still alive, and if the fire wasn’t doing enough, Patton would have to do the rest. He'd have to touch him more either way, and whatever happened after that was something he could worry about later. It wasn't like anyone but maybe Logan would miss him if he died.

Patton knelt beside him and started stripping off the Viper’s clothes, soaked through with melting snow. They were so cold they made _him_ shiver; he couldn’t imagine how bad they’d felt on the Viper’s skin while he was aware. At points he had to cut the clothes apart, gummed together as they were with dried blood, and when he was done he averted his eyes for modesty, bustling around for more blankets and setting a pot of water to heat in the fire.

“Warm cloth, blankets, off the ground, touching,” he recited, casting nervous glances to the ice-chapped body on the floor. There was a pile of blankets under him. Was that enough, or was the floor still too cold? This would have been so much easier if Logan were with him. “You’re doing really good!" he cheered, in case the Viper needed encouragement. "Feel free to be a _piper_ and pipe up any time now, it’d be nice to hear another voice.”

Bandages were a long shot, but he wrapped them around the Viper’s wounds anyway, washing the cuts with warm water to get the grit out. They weren’t bleeding a lot, but that could have been from the cold; Patton wasn’t about to count on it lasting.

That done, he dipped scraps in the warm water and laid them on the Viper’s body, then stripped down to his underclothes and slipped under the blankets with him. The Viper's skin was so cold it hurt to touch; Patton took a sharp breath at the pain and put his arms carefully around the other man’s body, trying to avoid his injuries.

Slowly, the blankets warmed, and the Viper started shivering. “Shush, shush, it’s okay,” Patton whispered, in case he was awake enough to understand. “You’re safe, no one’s gonna hurt you, everything’s okay. I _promise_.”

The shivering got worse, but Patton kept replacing the warm washcloths, kept stoking the fire and cuddling the Viper in between, and it abated, leaving him something close to warm. “Everything’s okay,” Patton repeated, hoping to convince himself as much as his guest, and tried not to wonder what would happen when the Viper woke up.

*

In the morning, Patton moved the Viper to the bed and passed out on the floor for a couple hours. He’d stayed up all night making sure the Viper didn't die, watching anxiously as his breath stuttered and his pulse slowed, as he held onto life by a skinny little thread. Now his skin was a healthier color, scales flushed a darker yellow-green, and his chest rose and fell in deep, even breaths. The knife wounds hadn’t been as bad as Patton first thought: the Viper’s scales seemed to have deflected the blade, so the cuts were mostly shallow and sideways; none of them had hit anything vital.

That was a relief. Patton didn't have a clue what to do for a wound like that.

He lingered inside all day, keeping the Viper in the corner of his eye, and tinkered with a couple new toys all the while. There was this little clockwork soldier he’d made so it wound up and marched across the floor, and a pair of tin wagons he’d beaten into shape the other day that needed wheels and more details. Patton usually kept his tinsmithing to the shed beside his house, where he’d built his furnace, but he kept worrying that the Viper would die if he was out of sight.

Or he could wake up and kill Patton while he was distracted with his work. That was a possibility, too.

Patton fidgeted, putting the toy soldier down, and stole yet another glance at the sleeping stranger. The Viper didn’t look so scary, not while he was asleep. He wasn’t very tall, and while his scales glittered dully in the firelight, they were more pretty than disfiguring. His face wasn’t smooth in sleep, but it wasn’t fierce, either: his expression was tense and worried, like a tired mother’s or a beggar’s, and there were stressed wrinkles around his eyes. He looked like he'd been facing trouble for a long time.

“You can relax now, you know,” Patton said softly, braced in case the Viper woke up. “I won’t hurt you. My friend might say I’m being dumb, but I’m not about to be mean for no reason.”

Then again, he technically did have a reason, and a _lot_ of them. The Viper’s misdeeds were known far and wide.

His gang had razed and burned a town on the outskirts, leaving nothing but ash behind. They’d attacked every caravan along the White Moon Road, a trade route that spanned all corners of the empire, and had stolen unimaginable amounts of food and riches. They’d smuggled classified information from Imperial troops and passed it across the border to the enemy.

Even more damning, the Viper had _personally_ executed a military officer in front of her own troops, bewitching them all so they wouldn’t interfere. Murder in cold blood was nothing a good person would do. By rights, Patton should have already sent for soldiers to take the Viper away.

It had snowed a lot the previous night, though. There probably wouldn’t be any riders for a while yet, and definitely none that would stop to take a message. Patton could wait.

The Viper didn’t wake up that day at all. Patton thanked his lucky stars for that, but it did mean he had to help the Viper get some water in him, tilting his head up and praying he wouldn’t choke. He changed his bandages, too, grimacing at the ugly red tint around the wounds. He’d have to find some willow bark for pain relief, and maybe honey, sometimes that was good for infections. Onion and garlic and wine, too, if he could find it.

“Where there’s a willow there’s a way,” Patton said cheerily, patting the bandages down. The Viper didn’t stir. “Don’t worry, though, Mister Viper. Its _bark_ is worth than its bite.”

No response. That night the Viper shifted a little in his sleep, mumbling, but he never opened his eyes.

The next morning there was a knock on the door. Patton froze, heart leaping into his throat, and dropped his tools in a clatter. The Viper was slumped in bed still, facing the wall with his scaled hand hanging from the side. Patton bundled it up under the blanket and pasted on his brightest smile to answer the door

A pair of soldiers stood at his doorstep, red uniforms stark against the white of their surroundings. Their horses were tied at Patton’s shed, pawing the ground and huffing impatiently; the men were clean and well-rested, though, with an insouciant air that told Patton they probably hadn’t been out that long. If they were from the local regiment, they'd likely been sent out just after dawn.

That didn't bode well, did it.

“Good morning!” Patton chirped, blinking against the glare from the snow. The ground was blanketed in snowdrifts deep enough to obstruct a whole caravan. “What brings you fellas out so early? Major Sanders’s commission won’t be done till next week.”

The younger of the two, barely old enough to grow a mustache but apparently so proud of what he had that he’d _kept_ the scraggly thing, said, “We’re hunting the Viper. Have you seen anything?”

Patton’s lungs were ice. Now was his chance- _he’s here, just behind me, I kept him alive so he could be tried ‘cause I’m a good citizen_ \- but the words wouldn’t leave his mouth. _Viper? I barely know her!_

“Not particularly,” he said. “I’ve been snowed in for a couple days!” And then, because he would’ve asked it in any other situation: “Is- is he close by? Is Trenton okay? I have a friend in Trenton, if something’s happened I dunno if I would’ve got word by now-”

“Trenton’s fine,” the older soldier said with something close to a sneer. It might not have been a sneer. He could’ve been uncomfortable or about to sneeze, or maybe he’d had a bad day in general, Patton didn’t want to assume- but it was probably a sneer. His heart sunk. “We’re investigating reports of the Viper in _this_ area. I’m afraid we’ll need to investigate your home.”

Oh. Patton’s smile almost wavered. “Okay! Do you wanna start with the shed? My brother’s really sick, so I don’t wanna wake him before he’s ready.” He injected as much regret as he could into his tone, widening his eyes in earnest. “He was coughing like a horse last night! Which is to say he was coughing himself _horse_. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to rein it in so he could sleep.”

The younger soldier nearly laughed. The older one scowled. “I think we’ll search your home first, actually,” he said, stepping into Patton’s space. “It would be a real shame to find you hiding contraband.”

Now Patton’s heart sunk for a _different_ reason. He’d suspected the soldiers might just be bothering him because he was a tinsmith, but having it confirmed was worse. The last time the army had visited his home, they’d stolen everything they could carry.

It was the price of a safe, protected countryside, especially in the outskirts, but that didn’t mean Patton had to like it. Getting intimidated into letting them take his wares got tiring, after a while. “Oh, um. Sure. Would you like some tea?”

“That would be-”

“No,” the older soldier said, cutting his companion short. He pushed past Patton into the cabin, glancing around and zeroing in on the desk. He picked up one of the half-finished pieces and demanded, “What are these supposed to be?”

“Wagons,” Patton said, keeping out of range. “They’re not done yet.” The soldier huffed and dropped them. Patton winced at the sharp clatter.

The younger one sidled in, too, but he didn’t go to the desk. He gave Patton an apologetic look and said, “I don’t mean to be rude, tinsmith, but we _are_ meant to be looking for a criminal. I’m going to have to wake your brother.”

“He wasn’t out the past few days at all,” Patton protested, voice going high with nerves. “And he’s already unwell. If you wake him up, you might make him worse. The kiddo needs his rest.” Not that the Viper was a kiddo, but when Patton had had a brother, he'd always called him kiddo. Not that Virgil had _liked_ it, since he'd said he was almost an adult and should be treated like one, but-

But nothing. Patton had to focus on what was happening now.

The other soldier was still rummaging around in his desk for “contraband”. Patton pushed down his indignation and suggested, “I think the soldier’s pretty nice. The little toy one, I mean.”

The soldier held it up, turning it to watch it glint in the light. “What the hell’s this thing on its back?”

“It’s to wind it up,” Patton said, defeated. The sacrifice of a clockwork toy for all his commissioned work was necessary, though; being late on something he was paid for never ended well. The soldier twisted the key and watched the legs move with interest, then dropped it in his pocket. Patton swallowed his pride and said nothing.

“Right,” the older soldier said, satisfied. “You’re lucky we didn’t find any contraband this time, tinsmith. You wouldn’t believe the things ordinary citizens get up to when they think they can get away with it.”

Oh, wouldn’t he? “So you’re done here?” Patton squeaked. “I mean. If there’s no contraband-”

“We’re looking for the Viper,” the younger soldier snapped, glaring at his compatriot. “A person. Not some random citizen's _things_. We have a duty.” The older one rolled his eyes. The solder turned to Patton and said, all in earnest, “I really am going to have to see your brother. You can move the blanket from him, if you think it’ll make him more comfortable, but we do have to see his face.”

“Right,” Patton said, terror making his hands shake. He stuffed them in his pockets and said, brighter, “Okay, then! Just please keep your voices down?”

“Of course,” said the young soldier. Patton wondered if he’d sound so solicitous when they were lining up the firing squad.

He picked his way over the blankets on the floor and brushed a hand over the Viper’s face in silent apology. “He’s right here,” he said, smile trembling. “Please don’t wake him. He’s- nervous, by nature, he’ll be scared.”

The solder reached past him and pulled the covers from the Viper’s face, revealing his unblemished cheek. Patton prayed that would be it, but then he took hold of the jaw and tilted his head to the side-

To show smooth, clammy skin, without a hint of scales. Patton released a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Thanks for not waking him,” he managed, as the soldier drew back. “I- I hope you find who you’re looking for. It’d be nice to feel safe out here again.”

 _Even nicer feeling safe from you,_ he didn’t say, and the younger soldier nodded to him on their way out. Patton’s shoulders slumped when they were gone. He went over to his desk and started picking up the scraps, cringing at the dents in the poor wagons, and looked back up to make sure the Viper was okay-

Only to meet a pair of bright, mismatched eyes, studying him in the gloom.

“Oh,” Patton said, fear stealing the strength from his voice. He’d left the Viper’s knives on the table just by the bed. There was no way he could reach them first. “Hello. Are you feeling better?”

The Viper stared. “No,” he said, and behind his lips was a hint of fang. Patton trembled. “But I’d very much like you to tell me something.”

 _Where do you keep your money_ , Patton anticipated, or _do you know how much blood is in a human body_ , or _who else have you told about this so I can kill them too_. He nodded, bracing for the worst, and the Viper demanded, “Why didn't you tell them who I am?"

"I... didn't want to?" Patton hazarded. The truth was, he didn't really know. "You're sick. It- well, it just didn't feel right."

"Didn't feel right," the Viper echoed, incredulous. "When the Empire tells everyone I'm an unrepentant monster. It didn't _feel right_ turning a treacherous murderer in to the authorities?"

"That's right," Patton shrilled, wondering just how much being stabbed would hurt. "Um. You _are_ the Viper, right? 'Cause of the scales? It seemed like that was probably the case, but I didn't want to assume-"

"Yes," said his guest, eyes going sharp, "I'm the Viper. The Empire's most wanted, a _horrendous_ traitor who cares for no one but himself and loves doing violence for the sake of it. I'm the boogeyman used to keep society quaking in its boots, an excuse for the military to terrorize the outskirts in the name of peace and justice." He glared, bizarrely indignant. "And you just scooped me up out of the snow and _took me home?"_

"You sure do talk yourself up a lot," Patton said, because he couldn't help it. "I'm sorry to tell you this, kiddo, but you weren't all that _horrendous_ down in that snowdrift."

"Oh, please. As if anyone is intimidating while they're unconscious? All you have to do is slit their throats."

Patton swallowed. "Um. I didn't think of that." The Viper stiffened, lips drawing back in a snarl, and he added, "And I'm not thinking of it now, either!"

The Viper was still glaring incredulously. The Viper was mad, might want Patton dead, but-

That infection was going to get worse before it got better, and Patton's guest was still weak. He hadn't even gotten up from the bed yet, and Patton knew enough defensive body language to know he wanted to. The Viper wasn't sure he could stand without falling over yet, so he was staying put and pretending he had more strength than he did. He was going on and on about being evil and stuff so Patton would be distracted, but he hadn't even gone for the knives yet. 

He was _scared._

"You don't have to worry," Patton said, mind made up. "I'm not gonna hurt you, or I wouldn't've picked you up in the first place. All I want is for you to get better. So." He cleared his throat. "It's nice to meet you, Mr Viper. My name's Patton." He smiled, kind of happy to see his guest sitting upright, even though it meant a lot more danger for _him_. "Can I get you some tea?"

"You're not lying," the Viper said.

Patton asked, bewildered, "Why would I be lying about being named Patton?"

"You-" The Viper drew a hand down his face, exasperated like Virgil after Patton brought home _another_ abandoned baby animal. "That's totally what I meant."

"So you don't want tea?" Patton tried. "'Cause I think I have coffee somewhere too, or I can just make soup-"

"I would like some tea," the Viper said, watching him like that was code for something and Patton was about to brain him with the teapot. Patton mentally shrugged and went to brew it, humming a little to himself and keeping his guest in the corner of his eye.

The Viper didn't try anything, though. All he did was sit there and observe, mouth twisted in a suspicious sneer- but he drank his teacup to the dregs, and thanked Patton after.

Patton figured that was as good a start as any.

**Author's Note:**

> TW: hypothermia, corruption, theft, stab wounds


End file.
